Finally arriving on store shelves this week is Spore the extremely ambitious game from the creative mind behind one of the most successful franchises in all of gaming, The Sims. What is Spore you say? Well, the easiest way to describe it is a create your own species beginning at the monocellular level and evolve it to the point of galaxial domination. Yes, I just made that word up. At least MS Office says so.

Appearing in different incarnations on tons of different platforms including iPhone, PC, Mac, Nintendo DS, and yes even mobile phones,Spore is set to make its mark in gaming history.

Gameplay
Instead of trying to cram the full Spore experience on a cell phone and doing a terrible job at it, or pulling a trick where the name is just tacked onto a totally different game than its console or PC counterparts (cough,Rainbow Six, cough)

Spore instead only concentrates on a fraction of it's bigger brother's experience. In this case, it is the cellular level.

Starting in the Primordial Ooze and taking players all the way up to the Sandy Coast just before being able to crawl out of the surf, Evolution mode has players eating smaller organisms in order to fill their DNA bar. Once the DNA bar is full, the stage is complete and you move onto the next vibrantly colored arena.

Controls
Control is pretty tight, I played the game on the LG enV2 and only had a few instances of frustration:

1.The send and power/end key are much too close to the arrow keys on the right side of the phone, leading to horrible instances of sheer frustration when you power the game off accidentally during the only hard level (I'll get to that later).

2.The "OK" key is used for attacks, and on the enV2 it is much better to use the "W" key on the other side of the keyboard than try to aim and attack at the same time with the arrow keys and "OK" buttons.

EA/MaxisNot pictured: evil seafaring cows of confustication.

WTF?
This game is pretty easy and pretty fun, especially once you get strong enough to attack all the bigger creatures that you once had to run from in evolution mode. I only have one beef: LEVEL 18.

Perhaps Level 18 is this game's typical lame duck final boss fight, I don't know. The sudden switch in gameplay from strong hunter to weak prey kills what otherwise I think is a fantastic mobile game.

Level 18 strips you of your size, power, and health right from the outset, leaving you to lure enemies you should easily be able to eat to attack, for the lack of a better term, three eyed floating cows. Get about four or five of your foes to attack these aquatic bovine behemoths and they explode, leaving you with the basest of creatures to eat. Unlike your creature, these giant specimens have no distinguishable features, and when there's more than two or on screen at once, it's hard to keep track of which one whose health you have whittled down. Blow up two or three of these aberrations, and you'll have filled enough of your DNA bar to attack the other creatures in the level, top off your DNA bar, and finish the Evolution mode. That is if you don't accidentally hit the "End" key after your first successful encounter with a floating cow and quit the game...yeah, that happened to me a few times.

Progression

EA/MaxisToo bad you can't create an uber creature with the best of every appendage

Every three stages changes the level, and in between those level changes is where the main draw of Spore lies: the creature creator. While not nearly as robust as in other versions, the mobile game offers quite a bit of customization. Players can add scales for defense, teeth for attacking, and add antenna for tracking food, amongst other appendages. In addition to the aforementioned appendage applicator, you can tweak the size of any of your creatures 3 body segments, add different textures and colors, and give it a gigantic head and impossibly small body. Make Darwin proud!

Finish the Evolution mode and two new modes are available to you: Survival and Arena.

Survival
Survival mode is basically the arcade classic Snake, except you don't have a tail that gets progressively longer or apples to eat. Once you start in motion you don't stop, screen borders be damned. Instead of apples you're eating things shaped like Twinkies covered in Frank's Red Hot sauce (now there's an idea) with rings coming out of them to, you guessed it, fill that DNA bar! And if that's not enough there's enemies to avoid while dashing for those Twinkies. Starting off slow, small in numbers, and easy to subvert, they become progressively harder to avoid (some even shoot frickin lazers!). I only made it to level 12 before I died, and the enemy count and ferocity hadn't reached Geometry Wars levels of intensity and difficulty, and I don't know if it ever does.

At your disposal to use against your adversaries are randomly placed powerups. You can carry one at a time andeffects range from a lightning bolt attack against several enemies at once, the standard kill everything in a given radius bomb, a shrink ray to use on yourself, and even a revolving set of blades to mow down all those that oppose you. Slaying your enemies boosts your score, and by the end of my run I had racked up 7,200 points, not too shabby. When it prompted me that I had placed in the top 10 I was shocked. In the world? OmGZ! Those dreams were shattered when I realized it just meant top 10 on my phone. I wept openly
.Arena
Before you get your hopes up as high as mine were with the Top 10 fiasco, know this: the arena mode acts a lot like the multiplayer aspect of the PC game. That is, you don't fight against other players in real time, you fight against their creatures. Before you enter online, you are prompted to create an EA account and this ties your creature to your username, allowing anyone anywhere to "fight" your creature to the, ummm.... death.

Battles play out like this: two creatures start off in the center of the screen, rub against eachother, cause life bars to shrink. Creautres go off camera, eat base creatures, regain health, fight more. Yawn. Death. Repeat. Although, if your creature wins you can send a "Victory Cry". A text message which can say anything, but is better left blank. I felt great joy when I won a battle and sent a message not fir to reprint here, only to realize that no one would ever get to read it. Talk about a buzzkill.

My Take
So what if it isn't the God game it's PC/Mac cousin is? Spore Mobile is the portion of the game that makes most sense on a cellphone: a 2-D shooter with some pretty cool customization at that.

You can go through the Evolution mode as many times as you want, creating as many creatures as you want, but methinks most of your time will be spent in the Survival mode after reaching the top of the foodchain. By my journey's end I had logged in 00:46:34 (hours:minutes:seconds) and 13,340 points. I don't think I would play through Evolution mode more than maybe once more though.

Spore Mobile

Platform: iPod, iPhone, most cell phone carriers

Price: $3.99 - $7.99

Players: 1

Online: Sort of

Developer: Maxis

Publisher: Electronic Arts

Who it's for: People who want an original shooter that like to "pimp things out"

Your friend and mine, B-Dawg, is back and walking us through the new Halo 3 map "Assembly". Not sure what a lobster is? Well it's short for lobsterback, which urbanditionary.com defines as

The "Elite" Player model in the game "Halo 2", the definition's origin is unknown (Though thought to have originated by some member of the GAMEFAQS forums), but it is a derogatory reference to the cumbersome nature of the player model and what it looks like from behind at a distance. lobstervision Refers to the lobsterback's HUD.